A wise man once said that "a house divided against itself cannot stand".
Considering that he was on the verge of assuming the chief executive slot of a nation essentially split in two at the time, it is safe to say that nobody could possibly know this to be true with a greater certainty than he himself did. As time wore on and a war broke out over, principally, the question of whether or not one individual could hold another as personal property, he became increasingly determined to reunite the states which had seceded to form a country of their own. Doing so through a series of gruesome conflicts which resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides of the firing line, though not without a deep sense of purpose and determination for all parties involved, his perseverance eventually paid off. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to harvest the fruits of his labor as he was assassinated in short order after an armistice was reached by a loyalist to the former rebellion. As you probably very well know, this man's name was Abraham Lincoln and the conflicts what have come to be colloquially referred to as the Civil War.
History teaches us the most valuable of any lessons possible to learn. As an avid student of it, I have no difficulty in noticing the obvious parallels between the condition of affairs in the United States during the years leading up to, consumed with, and following the most tragic war in which a drop of American blood has ever been shed to what has been simmering for quite awhile in the sociopolitical realm of our nation. On both sides, left and right, the notion of frank, but sensible and genial, discussion has become the stuff of eras past, or, to some, nothing more than the last refuge of cowardly centrists who commit the unforgivable atrocity of placing dogmatism above objective reality. In environments where mindsets of this nature are predominant, malaise is sure to be the name of the endgame, though not before a path littered with broken dreams and false promises must be trudged down. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of nightmare which a great number of our ancestors fought to escape for an opportunity to have but a single shot at the American Dream.
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